


Pride

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, The Stolen Century, Wonderland, the rest of the IPRE cameos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 14:33:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16410272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: The only ones who can resist the relics are the ones who made them. There's a reason for that.





	Pride

When the others reform after Lucretia’s year alone, Magnus barrels toward her already telling his story. “You missed me getting turned to stone,” he says. “It was kind of awesome, who else can say they did that?”

“The rest of us,” Taako says drily. “Apparently you weren’t the only one in contempt of the court, my man.”

“Really?” Lucretia isn’t sure whether Magnus is disappointed that the others were petrified or that he’s no longer sole claimant to the title. “Dunk.”

“You kept the ship safe,” Davenport observes, and it’s at that moment – with the confirmation that she _fucking made it_ – that the strength rushes out of her and she sags onto the deck.

 

“Why do you think they didn’t take me?” she asks a few days into the next cycle. She’s helping Lup and Barry do dishes. She can’t bear to be alone right now in case the others disappear again when her back is turned. Each night has been spent on a different person’s floor. Last night Magnus made a halfhearted effort to kick his dirty clothes under the bed, but he stayed up past midnight while they did each other’s nails, so it turned out alright.

(“They said I was wrathful,” he told her. “I thought I made a pretty good argument, but I guess I proved them right when I charged the guy. I got so sick of the bullshit, you know?”

“The game was rigged from the start, and you wanted to make sure the rest of us were safe instead of playing along. I don’t think that’s a sin.” Lucretia blew on her wet nails. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.” She had written that in her journals, detailed defenses of the charges brought against her family, and years later it is that ruling that will be broadcasted across the planar system, pleading everyone’s case but her own.)

“You must’ve hidden well enough,” Barry says. “I don’t know if I could’ve done it. We should all get more practice at the helm, I guess.”

“No.” Lucretia shakes her head and puts the mug back in its spot without looking. After decades, she could navigate this galley with her eyes closed. “Later I evaded them, but that first time the six of you didn’t get caught. You were just gone.”

“We got judged,” Lup says with a laugh. She’s drying plates with gouts of precise fire that boil off the water and shrivel bubbles of fantasy dish soap into abstract shapes. “Old school, too. Greed, gluttony, you know the ones? What do you say, Luce, any of that ring a bell?

“You think they didn’t catch me because I didn’t do anything wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Barry runs the last plate under the water and reaches absently into empty space for the next one. “They accused us of things we haven’t done. At least, not yet. If you hadn’t been there to fly the Starblaster, we wouldn’t have a future to... maybe do all that terrible shit, I guess.”

“The fact that you had to think about it means we have _got_ to open some room in your schedule for a little sinning.” Lup pokes her on the nose and leaves behind a blob of gleaming bubbles. “Where do you want to start? Taako’s cooking dinner tonight, so it’s a good time to get your gluttony on.”

For the last year, Lucretia has been living on cold rations and whatever she could scrounge from the blighted planet she skimmed across. She’s missed Taako’s cooking. “That sounds fucking fantastic,” she says, and she tries not to think about the judge’s world for a while.

Later, she has plenty of reasons to remember it. She’s limping through the Felicity Wilds, twenty years older. (Or thirty-seven years older, or one hundred and twenty years younger than she should be. She has not looked her age for a long time.) She has lost more than that: dexterity, constitution, the magic items she created while learning to artifice, a favorite book she’d carried for comfort all the way from home. Some of these are penalties she accrued when she refused to give up any of her memories. That frustrated her hosts. “Really?” the female lich asked, her tone rising like someone questioning a stubborn child. “Not even a birthday party? Well, if you want to stay longer and spin the wheel some more, we’re happy to oblige. It’s really the best case scenario for all of us, if you look at it right. More fun!”

“What the fuck are you doing?” her companion had asked, but she’d ignored him and taken every penalty herself. Lucretia can’t forget a single second of her journey. After stealing that from everyone else, she owes it to them to make sure she keeps their story safe.

It’s funny, but she can’t bring herself to hate the liches. Elven siblings, dead magicians who’ve kept their minds whole - they remind her of her family, seen through a broken funhouse mirror. Besides, Wonderland only echoed her own belief in sacrifice. When she started down this path, she’d already given up what really mattered.

“Won’t that hurt the other players?” Cam had asked the first time she raised her hand toward forsake.

“This gives us our best chance of moving forward.” In Wonderland, she’d taken on the leader’s role for the first time, drawing on memories of Davenport’s firm tone, Lup’s self assurance. During her year alone, she’d gotten used to issuing orders to herself _. You have to get out of bed; the scouts might find you. Remember to eat one meal every day; if you lose your strength, no one gets out. Keep your chin up, goddamnit, they’re counting on you._ Issuing commands to someone else isn’t that much harder. It’s all a matter of convincing them of what matters. It’s a matter of convincing herself. “It’s good game theory,” she said, and pressed the button.

Lucretia forsakes, and forsakes, and forsakes. 

In the end, it’s not enough. She flees not to save her skin but to prevent the truth from dying with her. She’d underestimated Wonderland. If she’d had Merle’s holy power, or Taako slinging verbal barbs to keep her spirits up, or Barry to show them what a lich could really do… but no. They made their choice, and it damned the world. She’ll have to find another way.

Before she entered Wonderland, she’d hidden her staff under her strongest warding spells. She didn’t want to risk the one relic she did have. Once she escapes, the first thing she does is retrieve it. She feels a little better with it in her hand. This is one fraction of the light no one can use to ravage the world.

It speaks to her, of course. That’s part of what Barry called the light’s desire to be desired, what Magnus called cravability. Lucretia calls it thrall. _You are the only one who can protect them_ , it whispers. _You can be the watcher at the gate. Use me to build a barrier around the world, and together we can fix everything._

Lucretia isn’t tempted. It’s not time yet. The Bulwark Staff may be humming with abjuration magic, but it is only one of seven. She’ll find another way to get the other six. She has to.

As she stumbles through the woods, she imagines the stone judges looming over her, and she pleads her case. _The Escape Game was my only way out, and without me this plane will be torn apart by the relics. Cam was a victim of the Animus Bell. If I’d died there, there would only be more._ That’s only the most recent in a growing list of crimes that demand justification. _I didn’t know Davenport would be affected so badly._ (Is that true, or had she pretended not to know?) With every choice, every mistake, those stone forms seem to bend down closer. _I didn’t know my reclaimers would keep dying; I thought a warning would be enough._ When she finds three who survive, and her first rush of joy at their familiar faces wears off, _I didn’t know Merle would leave his family. He seemed so happy at the beach. I didn’t know Raven’s Roost would fall; Magnus had_ won _. I didn’t know Taako would... be like this, without her. It would have been worse, wouldn’t it, for him to know what he was missing? I thought it would only be a year, they would be fine, we would be_ safe.

But writers are trained to be precise with their words. _Didn’t know or didn’t think?_ Didn’t want to consider anything that challenged her narrative. Lucretia the lonely journal keeper caught in her own personal thrall, digging herself deeper even as midsummer and its inescapable deadline looms.

She can’t stop now, can’t abandon another Cam six rounds deep into Wonderland with empty hands to show for it. Is that bravery talking, or cowardice? She thinks it’s desperation. This has to be the right choice. It has to work. If everything she has done was for nothing...

Then she is the villain in this piece, and that is not the story she is writing.

_You and me_ , the staff croons. _Together we can make everything safe._

Lucretia nods vaguely to be polite and then begins to walk. For the first time, she uses the staff to lean on. Forties isn’t old (she’s much older than that) but Wonderland sapped her of vitality too. There’s nothing the staff can say to affect her mind, because there’s nothing in it that she didn’t put there. She’d taken one seventh of the Light of Creation and poured everything into it – her dreams, her fears, her frustrated hopes – and this is what she’d made. Its thrall has no power over her, because it is only what already lies in her own heart.

 

“Biographies aren’t real writing,” another member of her workshop had told her once. “You’re just copying down what happened. It’s not art.”

“It is,” Lucretia had said mildly. She got variations of this a lot. Even if back then she didn’t defend herself as readily, she could defend the merit of her work. “You don’t just write down what happens. You have to see the shape of it, take out the parts that don’t fit, make the important parts shine. That’s where the art comes in.”

“And people don’t mind you doing that to their lives?”

“I work with them.” Ghostwriting autobiographies involved meeting after meeting to get everything just right. “But it’s easier for someone on the outside to do it, a lot of the time. It’s hard to see your own life as a narrative. It’s too personal.”

She’d known she was good, then, even before a century of telling tales focused around seven souls. When she sat down to revise her family’s lives, she’d tried to write each of them the ending they deserved. But people’s lives aren’t stories, and they’d all gone off track. Maybe there are some things you can’t scratch out and write over. Maybe she’d never known what she was doing.

 

When she listens to the staff, she hears her own thoughts as the seven of them had made the objects that would lay waste to this world. _Why won’t they listen? I know I can do it, I know the solution, I can do this. I can build a barrier and keep the Hunger out. Just let me_ try _._

She’s trying, now. It’s harder than she’d thought. The staff’s puffed up opinion of itself grates on her these days. It is the arrogance of a woman who has been overruled without the experience she’s earned by doing the overruling. The relics were their desires and ambitions, the way they conceived of power without the wisdom of knowing that power might not be worth having. Even the purest of intentions warp. In Phandolin she sees Lup’s desire for a weapon powerful enough to burn the whole Hunger to ash. Lucas’s lab sinks under the weight of Taako’s need to make up for a childhood where he had nothing with everything. In Refuge, the chalice begs its audience to rush in to save people worth saving, heedless of the consequences. The bell made by a man who cheated death for love finds its way to those who use it for suffering. _Don’t you want to live forever?_ it asks, and neglects to ask what you’re living _for_.

It’s a matter of perspective, Lucretia had argued in her written response to the judges. What one person sees as a sin, another sees as a virtue. But the people are necessary. The gauntlet needs Lup’s conscience, the belt Merle’s grounded faith in something greater. Without that, it’s all too easy to cast their makers as a group of villains. The curse they gave the world is their flaws, given form.

_Use me_ , pleads the staff while she’s alone.

_Guilty_ , hiss the judges in her dreams.

She can say whatever she wants, pen elegant defenses, call on legal precedents from a hundred different worlds. But Lucretia knows what the judges would say if they could see her now. As she stares down the barrel of an umbrella held by a man whose life she’d revised with a jar of black ink and a selfish conviction that she knew best, Lucretia knows what their verdict would be.

Her sin is pride.


End file.
